fastlane’s Philosophy

fastlane automates the beta and release deployment process for your iOS or Android apps, including build, code signing, automatic screenshot capture, and distribution of your app binaries.

fastlane will continue to evolve in ways that make it indispensable for, and focused on these needs.

fastlane aims to be elegant in success, and empathetic in failure.

fastlane provides intelligent defaults for options, prompts for missing information, and a context that automatically shares relevant information between actions. All of this allows a simple, elegant Fastfile to do a lot of powerful work.

Since errors are inevitable, fastlane should show empathy and provide a suggested solution, or attempt to solve the problem automatically. Errors that can be anticipated should not crash fastlane, and should present users with a friendly message that is easy to spot in their terminal or logs.

Actions and Plugins

fastlane saw a lot of early growth through a wide number of actions that meet a variety of needs. Actions can trigger built-in fastlane tools, talk to external tools and services, and more. However, with more than 170 built-in actions, further growth here will make fastlane harder to understand and get started with. Another consideration is that actions which ship with fastlane represent a maintenance cost for the fastlane core team.

With these challenges in mind, fastlane plugin system allows anyone to develop, share, and use new actions built and maintained by the awesome fastlane community. If you have an idea for a new fastlane action, create it as a plugin and it’ll be automatically listed in the fastlane plugin registry. The most impactful and commonly used plugins could be adopted into fastlane in the future.

fastlane Tool Responsibilities

Each fastlane tool has a specific purpose and should be kept focused on the functionality required for that task.

• deliver: Upload screenshots, metadata, and your app binary to the App Store
• supply: Upload your Android app and its metadata to Google Play
• snapshot: Automate taking localized screenshots of your iOS apps on every device
• screengrab: Automate taking localized screenshots of your Android app on every device
• frameit: Quickly put your screenshots into the right device frames
• pem: Automatically generate and renew your push notification certificates
• sigh: Because you would rather spend your time building stuff than fighting provisioning
• produce: Create new iOS apps on App Store Connect and Apple Developer Portal using the command line
• cert: Automatically create and maintain iOS code signing certificates
• spaceship: Ruby library to access the Apple Developer Portal and App Store Connect
• pilot: The best way to manage your TestFlight testers and builds from your terminal
• boarding: The easiest way to invite your TestFlight beta testers
• gym: Building your iOS apps has never been easier
• match: Easily sync your certificates and profiles across your team
• scan: The easiest way to run tests for your iOS and Mac apps
• precheck: Check your app using a community driven set of App Store review rules to avoid being rejected

fastlane’s Relationship with Mobile Native Foundation

The Mobile Native Foundation (MNF) provides a neutral home for open source projects that support the mobile development community. It serves as a safe haven for tools and frameworks that developers rely on to build, test, and release high-quality mobile apps.

MNF recognizes fastlane as an essential tool for automating beta deployments and app store releases for iOS and Android. By hosting fastlane, the foundation ensures that it remains a community-driven, transparent, and vendor-neutral project which is free from commercial interests or proprietary lock-in.

Under the stewardship of MNF, fastlane will continue to thrive as open source software, maintained and improved through collaboration among developers, contributors, and organizations that depend on it.